Podcast Transcription - My Weird High Performance Habits
Hello and welcome to yet another episode of the business of Hearing podcast and today, we're not talking baby boomers. We're not talking marketing. We're not talking finding hidden profits in your business, buying your biggest competitor, etcetera. We're talking about something that's a little closer to home and that is your performance because to run a better business, you need to be a better business owner and I want to talk about some of the things that I've learned in my time around high performance and some of the key observations, lessons that I've learned through experience of how to be the best version of myself and perform at the highest levels. Let's jump in.
Welcome to the Business of Hearing podcast with me, Oli Luke, the podcast for entrepreneurial private practice hearing care clinic leaders, the ones who set benchmarks of excellence, build wildly successful businesses, grow their impact and navigate the choppy waters to spearhead the future of private practice hearing care. Thank you so much for joining us. Pour yourself a cup of tea and let's get stuck into this week's episode.
So welcome back and it remains a pleasure to share this with you. I've had so many nice comments and recently I was on a call with a guy who all the senior leaders in their business listen to this podcast and it's part of their weekly meeting to say if there was any key lessons that stood out which I just find baffling, and it's still me talking nonsense right now, it's 4:25 PM on a Monday. I can hear my kids are back from school in the other room and this is my final job of the day and probably one of my favorite just to share some opinions, share some thoughts, share things that I think will help you, and maybe things I wish I said to myself or I learned earlier in my career or little observations from studying others, learning through experience, etcetera or being the marketing geek that I am but today I want to share around high performance because high performance is an overused term and it's very, very subjective and we've all got our own definitions of what high performance is but regardless of how you look at it, for you to be the best version of yourself, deliver what you want to deliver, achieve what you want to achieve, you need to perform a certain level and it's subjective in terms of what that level is and I am basically spouting a very, very personal kind of view of the world right now so what I will share, just to set this up, is everything I'm about to share with you is not advice. It's not. Here's what you should do. I just want to share what I've observed in my own world as things that have worked well for me. You package these up however you want, you take whatever you want, you disregard whatever you want and my hope is there'll be one little thing that maybe I do in my own weird kind of set of habits and beliefs that may be helpful, may give you that 1% edge, may even help you be slightly better tomorrow than you were today and all that cliche nonsense but this may be a bit of a counseling session to myself because what I'm about to share with you are things that I've never shared with anyone because they're freaking weird, right? I'm about to share those little games that you play in your own head. The little narcissistic little things that I certainly do in order to try to encourage myself to do more, to perform better and all that fun stuff. Let me just start by trying to clarify what my belief of high performance is. My belief of high performance is doing what you say you're going to do and bringing the right level of energy to those moments. That's my personal definition of high performance and these three things that I found over time that have helped me to do them. None of these things are things that I've read in any self-help book. These are things that I've observed through my own day to day life, my own observations, my own behaviors. I would say two of them are pretty normal. One of them is very, very weird and I'll save the weird one for later because I'm a little cringing a little bit even telling you this because nobody knows this. I've never even shared this with my wife, close friends. It's weird so I'm sharing this with this microphone in front of me and yeah, we'll save that one but I'll come to that one shortly.
Let's talk about the other two so let me start with the first. The first is something called a character upgrade. Now, when I was a teenager, I enjoyed playing video games. My era meant that the video console of choice was a Play Station two and I spent many, many hours playing two games. One was SmackDown Two. I was a bit of a wrestling fan back in my day. It was pretty much what I learned the culture of the US and Canada was from wrestling, right? I learned that Stone Cold Steve Austin and the Rock were very, very different characters and as I've grown older, I kind of realized why they were different characters and many of the cliches that the WWF of the time played with which is always fun. The other game was grand theft San Andreas. I love that game. I spent more energy and time playing that game than anything else in my life for a good couple of years and the one thing that I loved about that game as a teenager in my mum's back bedroom, playing that game for hours on a box tv with a big stereo next to me and a bunch of posters of two pack and a bunch of rappers I didn't even know on a wall was that you could become whoever you wanted to become in that game, right?
You, you took the character CJ, you went to the gym, you got all muscly, you went and chose your clothes, you then chose your car, you had it resprayed, you then upgraded and bought houses. You went and did all these cool things, you were influential, you went round and bought properties like you could upgrade that character over and over again and I absolutely love that and it felt like that existed in video games and I was in a conversation with a buddy who, super successful, runs a mobile phone business here in the UK. They refurb cell phones and sell them to insurance companies, big groups, etcetera and me and him were walking in what would call a pound shop in the UK so I suppose a dollar store, everything in there is a pound and he turned to me and he just made a comment and he said, look at us, two millionaires walking around a pound shop and it felt really weird to hear because firstly, I'm like well no, I'm not a millionaire and then you go well, actually, let me just look at this. Let's just add assets together and go oh shit. In some version of the truth, I am a millionaire and like it was a moment where which I'll call a character upgrade is where you see yourself slightly differently because from as young as I can remember, I wanted to be successful in whatever successful meant to me at the time and I wanted to be rich whatever that meant in the time and all of a sudden in that moment, it was a little point of reflection where there was this kind of character upgrade that existed. I seen myself different and once you see yourself different, you act different and when you act different, you become that difference like, all of a sudden now I hold myself slightly higher. I felt like I was walking a few inches taller and just in those little moments, you have a character upgrade where you'll see yourself differently and sometimes you need somebody else to identify it in you. Tell you how awesome you are tell you how well that you've done or tell you what you have done is very, very difficult to do and you listening to this, it may be me telling you right now that running a private practice hearing care clinic and growing it to a stage where it supports you and your family is a significant feat. That is not something that most people can do. You are certainly unique in that and in that moment when that character upgrade kind of existed and occurred, all of a sudden it changed my view of myself which meant that I acted as the person that all of a sudden I felt like in that moment and as a result, you become the person that you act and that happens in all areas of your life, right? You have character upgrades. When you have kids, you now see yourself different. You have character upgrades like when you buy a certain car or something like that that you've dreamed about and now, you're the person driving that car and in that moment, you feel different and that was a little moment where that character upgrade existed and I'd say on my journey of growing as a business owner, growing as an entrepreneur, growing as a leader, growing as everything I want to become, I reflect on that moment as the stage where something just clicked inside me and it was very personal, a little bit strange but just to. Yeah, I suppose that was it. That certainly helped me on my way.
Second one, and then we'll come to the weird one. Second thing that I think has really helped me to perform at my highest levels is becoming good at managing my mental load. Now, what I mean by that is, as business owners, as leaders, as entrepreneurs, whatever you want to call it, we take on a significant amount of mental weight. We've got to remember and retain a lot of information. We're constantly being told lots and lots of information that we need to hold. Often, we're working when our energy levels are low and there's high expectations of who we are and what we do and unless you manage your energy levels efficiently, you can all of a sudden become almost the version of yourself you don't want to be in terms of not bringing the right energy to moments, not making good decisions in the moment, letting people down on their expectations of you, letting yourself down on your expectations of yourself and one thing that I found around managing mental load is I used to work as many hours as I could to the point that I was absolutely running on empty, to the point that I was not performing, I was just task ticking and then I learned that when you get to stages where you're just mentally a point where you need that break. Take it. Take it and find the quickest way that you can shift your energy and take a moment to yourself and I'll share what I do and I'm not saying you should do it. You'll find your own personal jam on this. Everybody's got their own things. I have a little three step approach and it takes me a few hours.
First thing I do is go to the gym. Go into the gym. I find to be really good if I can use spa facilities or something like that over the course of an hour, that really helps me to reset.
Second thing I do is just go and mind numbingly go to the shops, go and buy some new sneakers, go and buy a new jacket, something I know I need like the season's changing and I'm a man so I rarely buy myself clothes but just going out into that kind of environment for like an hour and then the third part is I go to my favorite pub and I have a grand total of two pints of beer. I know the exact pint. It's a European lager that I really like called San Maretti and my favorite pub, San Maretti is a really nice one and that no phone, no cellphone, no computer, no distraction. Just sit, reflect, think, listen to music. All of a sudden, that works really, really well for me so that's the second one and I don't know what yours is. Yours is very personable. Keep it to yourself but finding that little way over a few hours that you can just take feeling exhausted to refreshed is insanely valuable. Took me some time to learn my jam. My jam is so simple and odd and very, very basic but that's my jam.
The third one which is certainly the weirdest one is alright I'm gonna share this with you and then I'm probably gonna regret sharing it because it's really weird is let me try and phrase this in a way that makes me not get locked up in a mental asylum. I've almost created a character in my mind and that character is almost this archnemesis of myself. Now, I've created a guy in my head called Oliver and Oliver is me if I deliver on everything that I say, I'm going to deliver and I do everything that I want to do so Oliver wakes up at 05:00 AM. Every morning and he goes to the gym and when he goes to the gym, he trains really hard. He hits all his personal records and then he comes home and he's a wonderful father. When the kids wake up like Oliver is giving them all his energy. When he sees his wife, Oliver is giving her all the energy and all the attention, all the focus in order to be the best possible husband for her. When Oliver comes into work, well, he comes, he's the best leader. He helps all his staff to grow personally. When he has calls with clients, with members, he brings all the energy, he smashes it out the park. In terms of helping them to achieve what they're looking to achieve. Oliver is incredible. Now, I'm not Oliver, I'm Oli and I look at Oliver as this character in my mind because I know if Oliver does all those things consistently, the trajectory of his life and what he'll achieve is incredible. He'll achieve all the dreams that I have by doing those efforts in the right energy, in the right way with a compounding effort which means that me as Oli, when I wake up in the morning and my alarm goes off at 5:00 AM I have a little thing that goes, Oliver would be getting up now because my biggest fear in the world is unfulfilled potential. I feel like I've got a lot of value to add to the world and my fear is not doing that as a result of not being true to who I am and I know that Oliver's trajectory is very, very steeply in the upwards direction. Me, I've got a choice because I could go in that direction and be that Oliver guy or I could lie in bed, I could snooze the alarm, I could not exercise, I could be a little bit overweight, not be the way that I want to look, not be the way I want to feel. Do the bare minimum at work, not feeling a good headspace or energy. Say yes often to my friends to go to the pub to watch football, and all of a sudden, who I'm going to become and that trajectory is going to go in the wrong direction and I've always got that choice and I always know that Oliver's there and Oli's here and I've got a choice on who I become because that Oliver does exist but I need to commit and be able to meet some, sometimes those unrealistic expectations, right? But there's days where I beat Oliver. It's the days where I match him. I go to the gym, I hit the PBs, I bring the energy, I help people in the way I want to help them but that has been like a little game that I've played myself and it's somewhat narcissistic and weird, right? But I had to name him Oliver because yeah, that's what my mum calls me and it couldn't just be a random guy because all of a sudden it just becomes a little weird when a random guy's a better husband to your wife than you so I had to be almost a version of me that's perfect but that has really helped in terms of giving me something to almost match towards like that. That's my bar that I've set for myself and I've painted a picture to a point that it's a real person that is the perfect version of me that will achieve everything that he wants to achieve and then it's my choice but they're the three things when it comes to high performance, they're three little things that I've kind of picked up, little things that I do, whether it's those character upgrades whether it is managing mental load efficiently to bring the right energy to the right moments and then it is this competition that I have with this made up guy in my head who is the best version of me. Those are three little weird quirks that I've done over time that have been super, super valuable. Just thought I'd share them because I've never shared them with anyone because they're weird. I'd feel awkward even saying this face to face. Luckily, I'm just talking into a like a metal microphone right now so there's no judgment in the other direction but I hope that maybe something in there is helpful. At the very least, you judge me and go, I'm never listening to this weirdo ever again which is fine but at the very best, you take one little thing and you're like, I'm gonna try that and you may try going to the pub and having two drinks, or you may find that you create your own little, archnemesis. You may be finally realizing that time for a carrot to upgrade and you deserve the recognition but hopefully one of them things is helpful so you become a better version of yourself, be the person you want to become, achieve everything you want to achieve and I know we're not talking marketing or any of that fun stuff today but to be a better business, to run a better business, you need to be a better business owner and that all starts with you so hopefully this was helpful. I appreciate your ears and I'll speak to you again soon.
And there we have it but before you head off to skip to the next episode or eagerly await for next week's, I have three things for you. First of all, if you've enjoyed what you've heard today and want to learn more about our exclusive inner circle to discover how 60 plus clinics are setting benchmarks of excellence in private practice, benefitting from a mastermind of North America's most successful practice owners and having an industry leading marketing team driving gold standard implementation, then go to www.orange-gray.com. That's orange-gray. There's not only a video there detailing how you can win in the next two decades in private practice but it also shares a downloadable PDF with no ask for email address or anything like that, that will explain exactly what becoming a member looks like. Second of all, I strongly feel that private practice is in a very challenging spot right now, where we're the David fighting against Goliaths, made up of large groups, manufacturer owned chains, Costco's and whatever the next heavily funded Whizbang online direct response consumer model will be. I'm a strong believer in a rising tide lifts all boats and the more private practice can fight back at scale, the bigger impact will make so please consider a friend, a colleague, or even a Facebook group, a LinkedIn group, etc. where you can spread the word about this podcast and third and finally, it may be a little thing but a five-star review hitting subscribe will ensure you automatically download all future episodes and help the algorithm to grow the impact of this podcast and at the very least, it will certainly put a smile on my face when I go and look at the numbers so I look forward to talking to you again next week. Thank you for your ears and I'll speak to you soon.
